PERSINFORMATIE

London, 20 May 2009 - hotel.info - the leading online hotel reservation service with more than 210,000 hotels around the world - is reacting to the global economic crisis by targeting small and medium-sized businesses.

While www.hotel.info is noticing a reduction in overall business travel activity as a result of the global economic recession, it is benefiting as a cost-saving online agent from increased pressure to reduce travel expenditure. In recent months, small and medium-sized businesses have been increasingly willing to use cheaper online channels such as hotel.info to reserve hotel rooms.
In particular, the several thousand corporate discount rates that the online agent automatically activates when a corporate customer calls up hotel.info make a significant contribution to these savings. "These corporate discount rates are often up to 20% lower than the public room rate. At the moment we are receiving very many corporate rates from the hotels. Especially in times of crisis business travellers remain a welcome guest, who hotels hope will return again and again" explains Warini Munshi, Managing Director at Hotel.info hotel booking Ltd.

Online services such as hotel.info can offer high potential savings on hotel reservations to corporate clients in particular. These relate to process costs - after all selecting and reserving a room in a suitable hotel is much quicker through the Internet. At the same time, however, the direct costs - what the company actually spends on its employees’ overnight stays - can also be reduced significantly. This is assured not only by the online room prices, which are tentatively cheaper anyway, but also by corporate discount rates that can be reserved via the hotel.info corporate clients application and that provide access to an average 10% discount on the public bookable rate at more than 20% of the listed hotels.

Gabi Scharrer, who is a management-level PA at the medium-sized firm of opticians Apollo Optik confirms that hotel.info saves money: "By using the hotel.info application we have been able to both significantly optimise the process of booking rooms and also benefit from the cheaper hotel.info room rates."

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hotel.info

hotel.info is a free online hotel reservation service for corporate and private customers. The service offers more than 210,000 hotels for electronic bookings around the world. Customers booking via hotel.info achieve significantly better prices in comparison with other booking channels. In addition, hotel.info shows all available room prices for each hotel, so that the customer can always select the cheapest or most suitable room price. All bookings via hotel.info are transferred simultaneously, securely and directly to the respective hotel’s computer. This guarantees the unique integration of each hotel’s own reservation systems (CRS or PMS) and hotel.info’s own reservation system myRES into the hotel.info unified user interface.

At hotel.info, customers seeking hotel rooms can base their decisions to book a room not only on the core information such as room price and hotel facilities, but also on the hotel reviews and ratings submitted by around 1 million hotel guests from around the world. Compared with existing rating portals, hotel.info customers can rely on 100% genuine hotel ratings, since only customers who have booked and recently stayed in each hotel are asked for their opinion. Once a customer has selected an offer, the hotel is presented for direct online booking at attractive conditions, in line with the hotel.info "Check & Book" claim.

hotel.info is the international brand of hotel.de AG. This brand was created to further drive expansion within Europe. The aim is to establish hotel.info throughout Europe as the leading reservation service for corporate and private customers. Today hotel.info operates offices in Germany, France, Spain, Italy and China.